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A recent study by remote sensing researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) garnered national attention last summer when it estimated that an area approximately the size of Ohio was covered with the “built environment.” Other high-profile reports have highlighted the effect of urbanization on the country’s natural resources, including drinking water, farmland and coastal areas. The social, economic and health implications of a sedentary, automobile-dependent lifestyle also are being documented by an increasing number of studies. Many researchers attribute these burgeoning environmental and social impacts to “sprawl,” the attenuated, low-density development patterns that have become common since World War II.


Land use in the United States is predominantly a local issue. Across the country, land use policies are developed, and land use decisions are made, by elected and appointed officials at the county and municipal or town level. The cumulative effect of the case-by-case decisions made every night in town halls across the country determine the look, feel and functionality of the U.S. landscape. Thus, a strong case could be made that local decision makers constitute an audience for geospatial information and tools that is even more important than the more traditional users at the federal and state levels.


Serving this important clientele poses unique challenges. The worlds of remote sensing and local land use decision making, although drawing closer together, remain distant. Local land use officials are focused on the site level. They are decision oriented, but have limited access to technology and limited funds to acquire data. Until recently, remote sensing has been characterized by a large-scale focus. Such technology is driven by research objectives and is often costly. Consequently, local officials who may have access to geospatial data and tools often are unable to use them because they’re constrained by an inability to develop applications that are relevant to their operations. To truly serve this clientele, local officials need meaningful access to information derived from remote sensing in the form of multimedia products, creative tools and hands-on education.


Value-Added Remote Sensing
At the University of Connecticut, work during the last 13 years has focused on meeting the challenges of bringing “rocket science” to town hall. The work began with the Nonpoint Education for Municipal Officials (NEMO) Project. NEMO, developed in 1991 and still going strong, is an educational program for local land use officials that focuses on the links between land use and water resource protection. The catalyst for NEMO was the creation of the first Landsat-derived land use/land cover database for the entire state of Connecticut. At the time of the project’s inception, remote sensing was virtually unknown and unused at the local and even state level within Connecticut, and geographic information system (GIS) technology was just emerging from its infancy as a costly and labor-intensive tool.
 
 
     
  In the 13 years since NEMO’s creation, the project has worked with more than two-thirds of the towns in Connecticut, and provided the catalyst for a long list of changes to land use plans, policies and practices (see “A NEMO Success Story: East Haddam, Conn.,” below). NEMO also has served as a model for other states, resulting in the formation of the National NEMO Network currently comprising 34 projects across the country (see “National NEMO Network Unites Land Use Decision Makers,” below). In the process, the project has demonstrated that 30-meter-resolution Landsat land cover data can form the foundation of an effective educational program for local land use decision makers—if the information is presented through local workshops in which there is an opportunity for give-and-take discussion.

 
During the last few years, advances in technology have opened many new and exciting potential applications for land use planning, particularly with high-resolution imagery (see “Land Use Planning—High-Resolution Satellite Imagery Enables New Opportunities,” below). Just as important, the digital revolution has made many individuals and local agencies more comfortable with using computers in general, and geospatial technologies in particular. Based on these trends, the University of Connecticut Center for Land Use Education and Research (CLEAR), established in 2002 upon the foundation of NEMO, is engaged in several efforts that attempt to improve the understanding, access and use of remotely sensed data by community officials.
 

  
   
 
  Connecticut’s Changing Landscape (CCL) is the first University of Connecticut project developed under the CLEAR banner. The project consists of four land cover maps of Connecticut from 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2002. The land cover maps were created from Landsat Thematic Mapper and Enhanced Thematic Mapper images using a method that allows for direct and accurate comparison of the maps from different years. Although the CCL project isn’t ground-breaking by technical standards, it is proving to be an important informational resource for Connecticut communities. Remote sensing’s ability to track changes over time, combined with the ability of GIS to allow local users to “step back” from their site-level focus to see the bigger picture of what’s going on in their town or region, is proving to be of great interest to land use officials and professionals alike. CLEAR and NEMO principals have been kept busy since January 2004 briefing various interest groups within the state on the CCL results. These groups range from the Homebuilders Association to The Nature Conservancy to the state’s Regional Planning Organizations. In addition, the land cover change data are being incorporated into several NEMO educational programs. The expectation is that town planners and decision makers will begin to incorporate such analysis into town plans and documents, including natural resource inventories and open space plans.


The CCL Web site (http://clear.uconn.edu/projects/landscape/index.htm) provides project data and information in several different formats, each suitable for a particular technological comfort level. For those disinclined to bother with GIS altogether, statewide data tables are accompanied with maps provided in Adobe PDF files. Also, at the “Your Town” and “Your Watershed” portions of the site, searchable database protocols are used to provide town- or watershed-specific reports that include maps, data tables, statistics and animations depicting growth during the 17-year project period. At yet another site, browsers can use the online interactive map created with ESRI’s ArcIMS software. For GIS and remote sensing users, the data can be downloaded in several formats, including ESRI grid, ESRI shapefile and ERDAS Imagine *.img. The entire study area can be downloaded, along with subset areas of Connecticut by county, planning region or major watershed. About 200 downloads have been logged to date.
 

  
   
 
 
 

More sophisticated analyses will be added to the CCL project soon. A primary goal in creating the land cover maps was as input data to two models developed by CLEAR researchers under the NASA Regional Earth Sciences Application Center (RESAC) at the University of Connecticut. The first is a forest fragmentation model that indicates the state of fragmentation for a given area (such as watersheds or towns) using the amount of forest and the connectivity of that forest. The second is an urban growth model that classifies each area of newly developed land into one of five growth classes, ranging from “infill” growth to “isolated” growth. The first phase of the CCL project answered the questions “How much and where are we growing?” These new analyses are intended to begin to answer more complicated questions that are critical to discussing issues like sprawl and smart growth: “In what pattern are we growing, and what are the natural resource and social implications?”


There are several other CLEAR projects aimed at providing tools, information and assistance to community officials in practical and useful formats. The Impervious Surface Analysis Tool (ISAT) is an ESRI ArcView 3.x or 8.x extension designed to estimate the percent area of a watershed (or another user-specified geographic area) that is covered with impervious surfaces. ISAT also allows the testing of various land use change scenarios to determine how they could affect future water quality. The extension, written by staff at the NOAA Coastal Services Center, was designed around a prototype application developed by the University of Connecticut as part of its work as a NASA RESAC. ISAT can be downloaded from the NOAA Coastal Services Center Web site (http://www.csc.noaa.gov/crs/cwq/isat.html). As of June 2004, ISAT had been downloaded more than 400 times.
 

  
 
   
 
 

Another example is NEMO’s Focus on the Coast project, which was designed to encourage local officials in Connecticut’s coastal towns to incorporate coastal resources information into their local planning process. The primary educational vehicle, a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation, is supported by geospatial “back-up” provided via the Focus on the Coast Web site (http://www.nemo.uconn.edu/coastal/index.htm). For those interested in the planning process, there is an online tutorial that takes users through nine basic steps to completing a coastal resource inventory. For those looking for actual maps and data for their town or region, there is a Mapping Station that contains three ways to view and analyze GIS data, each requiring an increasing level of GIS skill. The first option employs ESRI ArcIMS technology and therefore requires only a Web browser. The second option uses ESRI ArcReader software and includes “Map Packages” for the 36 Coastal Zone Management towns. The third option uses ESRI ArcExplorer software, which connects to the data being served by ArcIMS. The option then allows users to add their own GIS data to the data provided on the Web site.


Closing the “Applications Gap”
In the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) 10-Year Industry Forecast for the geospatial sciences and technologies, it was noted that there’s a gap in resolution needs and availability, and an even wider gap with regard to meaningful, practical applications of high-resolution imagery. This conclusion could be broadened to encompass the entire geospatial field.
 

  
 
 
 
 

In general, new technologies are outpacing applications, and even basic uses. Thus, for those interested in bringing remote sensing and related technologies to the community level, the game has changed from simple marketing to value-added “translation.” Although it’s true that high-resolution imagery is valuable as a standalone resource for land use planning, the potential for tools and information derived from high-resolution imagery has, as yet, remained largely untapped.


There always will be people who can access new technology directly and immediately. But for many users, access depends on the educational programs, Web applications and other media through which the geospatial community provides information. Given this fact, the use of remote sensing and GIS at the University of Connecticut hasn’t been a linear evolution from simple to complex uses. Rather, as advances in geospatial science and technology enable more approaches, the project has broadened its array of informational options to enhance the workshop-based educational “toolbox” made available to communities.

  
     
 
 
Each advance in geospatial science and technology puts an additional premium on developing creative and thoughtful access to the resulting information. In the next several years, CLEAR will work closely with NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, which has turned research results into practical applications in many earth science areas. In addition, through CLEAR’s continuing educational work via the National NEMO Network, it’s hoped that many other researchers will work to help close the “application gap.” Time and energy invested in this endeavor will pay great dividends for the geospatial field and communities across the country.

 		  
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